A friend and I were joking the other day about the comedy of errors, and failures, that has come to define Democratic control of Washington. Of course the collapse of health care reform was the spark for this conversation; it is the most obvious and overwhelming failure of the Obama administration and its Democratic allies in Congress, but there are so many others. Start with foreign policy — Obama hasn’t even been able to get the Israelis and Palestinians to the bargaining table, let alone begin talks on final status issues. It is increasingly obvious that the “reset” in relations with Russia has produced not a single tangible success (unless one counts the 5 flights of materiel into Afghanistan, and only the U.S. ambassador to Russia is clueless enough to make that case). The administration once threatened “crippling” sanctions on Iran unless the Iranians showed a serious commitment to negotiations by the fall of 2009, then it was the end of the year, now it’s targeted sanctions some time later this year, maybe. Either way, no one seriously believes the Democrats will prevent Iran from going nuclear, or even that they want to.

And those are just the big issues. Obama has gotten nothing from the Chinese out of the administration’s new “strategic reassurance” policy — no one did more to scuttle the Copenhagen climate talks than the Chinese. Then there was the other collapse in Copenhagen when Obama sought to secure the Olympics for his hometown of Chicago. There’s engagement with Burma, which has produced exactly zero concessions from the junta on human rights issues. North Korea? Those “unprecedented” sanctions Susan Rice got through the Security Council didn’t really have much effect, did they? Gitmo is still open and will be for a very long time — which at least explains, to Obama’s mind, why al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is booming. And while the Democrats have done the right thing on Afghanistan, well, they can’t exactly rally the liberal base with that.